The day before today begins with “yes,” and I can affirm it was a good one, no doubts about it.
The first thing on yesterday’s agenda was the Wednesday Walkers group hike. We had something special planned: the rare journey to Tibag to start our hike. I asked my driver to take us there, but the turnout exceeded his vehicle’s capacity. Unbeknownst to me, Swan recruited a random van driver parked at the 7-Eleven to take us, and he agreed to do so for the same 1000 pesos I was prepared to pay my driver. So, that was a relief.
Here’s a six-minute video clip from this portion of the hike:
After the hike, we went back home for some rest and refreshment. Then, it was back into town to take care of some business. First up was finding a way to get that power of attorney shipped back to South Carolina. The LBC Express agent told me they could get it there in five to seven days. Good enough. They lightened my wallet 3000 pesos worth, I filled out the required info, and they placed the POA in an envelope for shipping. As this was going on, some workers were removing furniture from the back room and loading it on a truck. Seeing that was a little disconcerting, so I asked what was happening. The agent said they were closing the Barretto location and moving the business to Subic. Damn, okay. I hope they send my shipment first.
My next order of business was visiting my dentist, Dr. Barrera. My crown fell off while I was flossing a couple of weeks ago, and I needed it reattached. Dr. Barrera got it done, and I left his office feeling like a king again. (Does the title of this post make sense now?)
I was advised to not eat for an hour, but I clarified that liquids were okay to consume, and it just so happened to be beer o’clock. So, it being Wednesday, we headed up the highway in search of the venue for this week’s “seldom visited bar.” I had in mind Mugshots, but they are currently closed for renovation. We got invited inside for a looksee, and a dance stage is under construction. Just what we need, another go-go bar. We continued down the road and as we passed Annex Bar, saw my neighbor and high school mate, Mike, enjoying a beer, so we went in and joined him.
I hadn’t been to Annex for several months because they did not have wine available for Swan on my previous visit. They did yesterday, and so we were able to sit and enjoy some camaraderie with our tablemates. I’m happy to be able to add Annex back to my list of pleasant open-air venues to visit.
We debated between Sit-n-Bull for dinner or another round of drinks at Cheap Charlies and ultimately decided on the latter. The place was busy, and after we ordered, the bartender came back and said they were out of wine, but she had sent someone to fetch a bottle from the store across the street. Well done! That’s how you keep your customers satisfied.
Downstairs from Cheap Charlies is a restaurant named Foodies. They deliver upstairs, so I asked for a menu. Swan ordered a chicken burger, and I went with the beef stew. Feeling generous, I ordered some chicken fingers for the staff.
After we had finished our meals and were preparing to leave, I saw something on the horizon out of the corner of my eye.
We had our nightcap at Wet Spot. I had a nice chat with manager Brett and discovered that he also grew up in Southern California and that we had experienced similar youthful adventures as teenagers in Ensenada, Mexico. I can’t remember the last time I even thought about those wild days, but it was nice to reminisce. I couldn’t recall the name of the bar that was popular there, and neither could Brett, but he thought it began with an “H.” And then it hit me: Hussong’s Cantina! And I’ll be damned; they even have a Wikipedia page. It turns out that the bar was founded in 1892, and it is where the margarita was invented.
Man, oh man, I sure hope my dream of a heaven where I spend an eternity reliving my life comes true. If so, I’ll definitely be going back to Hussong’s.
Home early and safe as usual, but I did screw things up:
No Facebook memories worthy of sharing today, but I came across this blog post from March 2005 that made me smile:
I am in an embarassing slump. I find nothing of interest in my world to report and nothing of interest in the world in general, or at least nothing that inspires me to write.
I know this too shall pass.
My how things have changed! Now, I post every day regardless of whether or not it is interesting. So, is something always better than nothing?
Here’s some random shit I found on the internet today:
Stickman Bangkok shared a post he wrote in 2011 about a bargirl he met in Pattaya.
Today’s YouTube video discusses ways to adapt to and become more in tune with Filipino culture. I’m probably 50% on board so far.
Ready for some humor?
Today, I’ve been doing the Tuesday I missed because of my Manila detour. I’ll fill you in on that tomorrow.
First up was finding a way to get that power of attorney shipped back to South Carolina. The LBC Express agent told me they could get it there in five to seven days. Good enough. They lightened my wallet 3000 pesos worth, I filled out the required info, and they placed the POA in an envelope for shipping.
I hope you got a tracking number.
Death is the ultimate problem solver
And what’s the punctuation problem in that meme?
I like your moon shots.
Ahhh , Hussong’s . I was there just last month. You may not like it anymore , they have TV’s playing music videos way to loud. I didn’t stay long.
Thanks for the update, Terry. My memories from the 1970s are a little fuzzy, but that was before the music video era. I think it was more of a smoke-filled room vibe, maybe even sawdust on the floor.
Kev, I have a receipt, but online tracking is not an option. That’s why I spent fifty bucks for a back up copy of the POA, just in case!
What I noticed was the lack of hyphens on “problem-solving” and “problem-creating” skills.
And those hyphens need to be there because…?
I don’t know the terminology—compound adjectives describing the noun or something like that. I could ask Grammarly but you wouldn’t like that… 🙂
Phrasal adjectives that modify the nouns they PRECEDE should be hyphenated. There are some exceptions; otherwise, it’s safer to hyphenate if the phrasal adjective represents a single concept.
a tax-paying citizen (no hyphen: a citizen who pays tax)
a six-foot-tall man (no hyphen: a man who is six feet tall)
a three-month-old affair (no hyphen: an affair that’s three months old)
a bang-up job
a no-name brand
a fucked-up situation (no hyphen: a situation that is fucked up)
an end-of-semester party (no hyphen: a party at the end of the semester)
a faux-Irish wake (no hyphen: a wake that is faux Irish)
a well-written sentence (no hyphen: a sentence that is well written)
Don’t hyphenate if the first word in the phrase is an adverb ending in “-ly.”
a quickly deteriorating situation
a rapidly learning student
a mostly empty theater
A Swiftly Tilting Planet (children’s book by Madeleine L’Engle)
It’s not a hard rule to memorize, but I know you’re lazy and won’t learn it except passively, i.e., you’ll know to look for the error if I point out that there is an error (and you’ll find/correct the error without remembering the rule, which is why you can never articulate why something is wrong). But if, by some miracle, you were to practice the rule, you’d stop making mistakes in the future. I haven’t critiqued your prose in a while, but I’ve seen plenty of instances where hyphens were needed.
Every time you say something like, “I’m trying; I really am, and I think I’m improving,” I have no reason to believe you, and I wish you’d be more honest and stop saying that. Your time in HR made you think that it’s enough just to say something mollifying to get me off your back, but that’s a transparent grade-school tactic (see what I did with the hyphen?).
Anyway, here’s the classic example of why this sort of hyphenation is important:
1. a violent weather seminar
2. a violent-weather seminar
(1) is a weather seminar that turned violent; (2) is a seminar about violent weather. So it’s all about clarity. The classically dirtier version of this problem is that headline:
1. students get first hand job experience
2. students get first-hand (or even firsthand in this case) job experience
The error in (1) leads us salacious folks to think of handjobs.
Why, oh why, won’t you make the effort to just memorize and practice this stuff? Is it an old-dog-new-tricks thing? One rule a week, and if you’d started five years ago, you’d be a grammar genius with all the rules you’d have mastered by now—no Grammarly needed. But the fact is that we make an effort only when something is important to us, which is why you walk and drink (which, to me, is a paradox) but don’t give a shit about language. Priorities. And turning that criticism on myself: if I had a stroke and a heart attack, it’s because I was a lazy shit who didn’t prioritize his health until too late. So I try to apply my standards fairly to myself and others. This language stuff isn’t meant to be criticism “from above.” We’ve all got our flaws and problems. All of us.
Anyway, at the beginning of this comment, in bold, is the rule. Learn it and practice writing a few phrases every day. And practice the non-hyphenated “-ly” phrasal adjectives as well. Learn to tell one from another. Really make an effort instead of just making an empty claim (“I’m improving, I swear!”) that’s patently untrue. I’d love to see your error rates go down. I really would.
But it’ll only happen if you make learning this stuff a priority.
Which is why I’m not hopeful.
Kev, that was quite the verbal slapping, but I guess I had it coming. I do appreciate your efforts, but the truth is, I was never a good student. And admit it, hyphens are the least of my grammatical problems.
Why, oh why, won’t you make the effort to just memorize and practice this stuff?
I’m not joking when I mention my brain deterioration, which is manifested in an increasing inability to remember things. I’m struggling with the names of people I know; grammar rules may be a bridge too far.
That said, I WANT to do better, and I do sometimes notice when something I write looks off. So, I’m not giving up, but I won’t promise you’ll see significant improvement either. I do appreciate your attempts to educate me.
Why, oh, why didn’t the hyphen and comma keys break instead? Hmm, I guess because they get so little use.
That hand job headline was hilarious!
That said, I WANT to do better, and I do sometimes notice when something I write looks off. So, I’m not giving up, but I won’t promise you’ll see significant improvement either. I do appreciate your attempts to educate me.
Wanting to do better is fine. But please don’t tell me you’re making an effort, or that you think you’re improving, when you’re obviously doing neither. If you were truly making an effort all this time, you’d be able to quote back terms and rules that I’ve mentioned over the years, none of which have sunk in. If I were really your teacher, my top priorities would be to make you (1) regurgitate, in your own words, the terms and concepts I’d just taught you and (2) apply those terms and concepts to (a) examples I give you and to (b) your own original examples. And I’d be a bastard about it, too: if there’s one thing I learned from working at that tutoring center for almost three years, it’s that you never let the student get away with not demonstrating knowledge. As I wrote in my little book, if you’re not checking knowledge, you’re not teaching. That’s why a true teacher never uses the yes/no question “Do you understand?”—because most students will say “yes” just to get the teacher off their backs. “Do you understand?” is just lazy teaching that invites lazy student responses. This is why, when you successfully correct a grammar point after I’ve brought it to your attention, I almost always ask a followup question: “Why?” And usually, after I ask why, your response is almost always… nothing. Silence. Silence that reveals the bullshit. (Or reveals that you just parrot Grammarly.) Which means you didn’t really know the relevant rule, which in turn means you’ll make the same mistake again.
Basically, the onus of learning must be on the student. The student has to provide the feedback, show the knowledge, demonstrate understanding of the why. How else can the teacher know the student’s learned anything?
When it comes to better language, getting better means doing more than sensing something is “off” or “doesn’t sound right.” This is something I told my students over and over again: if you want to be consistently better, you need to learn the rules so you can see the how and the why. That means learning rules and terms related to grammar and mechanics (i.e., spelling, capitalization, etc.).
Some idiots will say something like, “You don’t need to learn the terms; just learn the rules.” But the terms are actually a useful shorthand for concepts so that people in a given field (in this case, language) can talk to each other without having to re-explain everything from square one over and over again. That’s why you need to know what a phrasal adjective (or, as Grammarly calls it, a “compound adjective”) is. Or a complex sentence. Or a noun phrase. Or what the future-perfect tense is.
Anyway, if you say you “want to do better,” I’ll tentatively believe you. But for that desire to be more than BS, I hope to see actual effort, not excuses about a deteriorating mind or hedging language like “but I won’t promise you’ll see significant improvement either,” which just gives you an escape hatch to be lazy.
Think of it this way: your bad habits (re: carb ingestion through food and alcohol, especially alcohol) are way worse than mine when it comes to bodily health, and while I’ve bellyached about the unfairness of that before (stroke and heart attack for me despite a lower level of carb abuse), the harsh reality is that, for someone like me who lacks your tolerance for carbs, I need to work harder because that’s the hand I’ve been dealt. I’ve got bad genes, so I have to deal with that instead of whining. By the same token, saying “I was never a good student” and talking about “brain deterioration” just means you’ll have to work harder than other folks to achieve the same results when it comes to language. Them’s the breaks. So either admit you don’t really want to get better or gird your loins and make a real effort, showing real progress.
If you want, I’ll put my money where my mouth is and tailor a curriculum to your needs and take you through a several-month course, step by step via daily email (weekdays only). I won’t even demand hours of homework per day. At most, it ought to be just a few minutes. If you’re serious. Frankly, I don’t think you are, but if you are, please let me know. And it won’t cost you a penny. We’ll start with your old enemy—commas. I’ll take you through the first six chapters of my blog series on commas, stretching the learning over several months. The first two chapters, once mastered, will solve 90% of the problems I see in your posts.
If you’re not serious about this, though, just be honest and say so. Please don’t claim to have a desire and then refuse to promise anything. That’s just empty talk, and neither of us wants to waste our time. How would it sound to a woman to hear, “I really like you and want to date you, but I can’t/won’t promise that I’ll hold up my end of the relationship”? Does that sound like something a solid, trustworthy person would say? Better to be honest and admit you don’t want a relationship at all. At least neither party would be stringing the other along.
Life is short. Let’s not waste time on bullshit. If you’d rather answer privately via email instead of in the comments, that works for me. I won’t say a thing publicly.
I sincerely appreciate the time and effort you put into this response and your willingness to be my tutor. I’m still on the fence about your offer and don’t want to waste your time. Let me think about it some more and let you know. Honestly, I’m at a point in my life where I don’t want to stress myself, but I also recognize that making my brain get out of its comfort zone might be a healthy step to slowing its deterioration.
I appreciate the honesty this time.